


passing by

by venndaai



Category: Dishonored (Video Games)
Genre: Dishonored: Death of the Outsider, Gen, The Sixth Sense (1999) - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-05
Updated: 2020-05-05
Packaged: 2021-03-02 22:48:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 472
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24014716
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/venndaai/pseuds/venndaai
Summary: A reunion at sea.
Relationships: Daud & Billie Lurk | Meagan Foster
Comments: 16
Kudos: 14
Collections: Three Day Rental: A Horror Themed Flash Exchange Round 1





	passing by

**Author's Note:**

  * For [plumedy](https://archiveofourown.org/users/plumedy/gifts).



The Dreadful Whale drifts quietly across a calm ocean. It makes Daud nostalgic, in a way he hasn’t been in decades, reminding him of a distant sun-soaked childhood, the creaking of a ship in motion, the wind in his mother’s hair. He misses Dunwall, too, finds himself hollow with longing for gray stone and the stench of fish guts and the smog of human misery, but it’s an expected pain, and he can put it aside, sitting slumped in a battered old armchair on the deck, watching the blue sea pass by. 

When he puts down the timepiece, he’s alone. When he lifts it up, she’s there, perched on the gunwale, one leg pulled up against her narrow chest. She’s dressed in the black and red of a familiar uniform- she’s wearing a sea captain’s coat- she’s wearing something leather and red as fresh blood. She has two arms. She has one. He keeps expecting her to unbalance, but of course she doesn’t. He remembers her sitting on the edges of rooftops, defying gravity in the way she could cling to brickwork. 

“Can you forgive me?” he asks her. 

She looks at him. With two eyes. With one. Either way her gaze is remarkably clear, considering the circumstances. She looks just like the girl he shot through the heart on a Dunwall roof as she knelt before him, looking at him with that same hawk-clear gaze. Then, between one eyeblink and the next, she’s changed. She’s a woman, worn by age, twisted by time just as he was. 

“The fuck would I be forgiving _you_ for?” she says, and makes a sound, not quite a laugh. “Don’t flatter yourself. You didn’t make me.”

“I killed you,” he says, the words a croaking confession, and he’s never confessed his sins before a court or an Overseer, but there is a familiarity to the sensation, and he remembers kneeling, the way she had knelt, before his own destruction; remembers the look on the Royal Protector’s face. 

“What?” she says, and with the word she seems to come into focus, suddenly. A middle-aged woman, peering at him through the same timepiece, with its fan-spread of blades, that he is using to look at her. He puts it down, suddenly. She’s gone. He lifts it back up. 

“Well,” he says. The wood of the ship looks solid enough beneath him. But his own hand is shifting, changing like the sea.

“You’re the ghost,” she says.

“It’s possible,” he admits. “But I think maybe… we’re both just looking through a crack at a different way things might have been.”

She’s silent for a while. He doesn’t push. Just looks at her, her short shorn hair and scarred face. 

“I forgive you,” she says. “Do you-”

“Long ago,” he says, and the ocean seems to whisper it back.


End file.
